Creole Drama

Theatre and Society in Antebellum New Orleans

Juliane Braun

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780813942322
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The stages of antebellum New Orleans did more than entertain. In the city's early years, French-speaking residents used the theatre to assert their political, economic, and cultural sovereignty in the face of growing Anglo-American dominance. Beyond local stages, the francophone struggle for cultural survival connected people and places in the early United States, across the American hemisphere, and in the Atlantic world.

Moving from France to the Caribbean to the American continent, Creole Drama follows the people that created and sustained French theatre culture in New Orleans from its inception in 1792 until the beginning of the Civil War. Juliane Braun draws on the neglected archive of francophone drama native to Louisiana, as well as a range of documents from both sides of the Atlantic, to explore the ways in which theatre and drama shaped debates about ethnic identity and transnational belonging in the city. Francophone identity united citizens of different social and racial backgrounds, and debates about political representation, slavery, and territorial expansion often played out on stage.

Recognizing theatres as sites of cultural exchange that could cross oceans and borders, Creole Drama offers not only a detailed history of francophone theatre in New Orleans but also an account of the surprising ways in which multilingualism and early transnational networks helped create the American nation.

1

Circum-Atlantic Theatrical Relations

The Emergence of the Francophone Stage in a Spanish City

On 18 March 1807 the New Orleans newspaper Le Moniteur de la Louisiane announced the production of a “Creole vaudeville” as part of a benefit performance at the local Théâtre de la Rue St. Pierre. Titled Papa Simon ou les Amours de Thérèse et Janot (Papa Simon or the loves of Thérèse and Janot), the piece promised a welcome change in a repertoire that was largely dominated by dramatic and musical imports from France.1 Thought to be one of the earliest existing literary works in Creole, Papa Simon is based on Rousseau’s 1752 opera Le Devin du village (The village soothsayer), a piece that was hugely popular in the métropole and was a mainstay in France’s colonial theatres. Papa Simon’s author was a man named Clément, who had acquired some fame as an actor and theatre director in Saint-Domingue and who had penned other plays in Creole that were produced on the stages of Cap-Français, Port-au-Prince, and Léogâne. In his version of Le Devin du village, Clément retained most of the original music, but he completely rewrote the libretto, adapting the opera’s plot to his New World environment. He exchanged Rousseau’s French village setting with that of a Caribbean plantation, turned the shepherds Colin and Colette into Creole lovers named Janot and Thérèse, and transformed the opera’s magician into Papa Simon, a wizard and practitioner of vodou from Africa. Clément also included some airs he had composed himself and added dances that were described as “slave dance steps” and “black dance steps.”2 The wizard, who appeared “in the true costume and color of the nègre,” seems to have been the play’s main attraction and, coupled with the piece’s New World setting and the other actors’ performances in blackface, regularly drew large audiences.3 After its premiere in Cap-Français in 1758, Jeannot et Thérèse, as the play was known in Saint-Domingue, was staged in theatres across the island and remained in the colonial repertoire for more than thirty years. Its arrival in New Orleans in 1807 marked another stage in the piece’s circuitous path across the French Atlantic.4

Papa Simon’s Atlantic journey can tell us much about processes of creolization and New World identities. Written and produced in Paris in 1752, Rousseau’s opera reached the American city of New Orleans in 1807 after an extended and transformative stopover in France’s most important colony, Saint-Domingue. Drawing on Old World music and genre conventions, Papa Simon’s New World author created a different piece, one that was not only written in Creole but also claimed to espouse a “Creole” vision. Crafted by a white resident of Saint-Domingue for a diverse theatre audience that was composed of white, free black, and possibly also enslaved people, this vision included not only slave cabins and African dances but also white actors performing their “Creole” parts in blackface. The genesis of Clément’s piece and the circumstances of its staging in front of New World audiences in Saint-Domingue and New Orleans, then, offer insights into the complexity of Creole identity and the multifaceted processes of creolization.

The origins of the word “Creole” go back to the Portuguese term “crioulo,” which designated a person that was born in the Americas but descended from an Old World family. Over the years, the term “Creole” also came to describe a person who had spent an extended period of time in the New World and, as a transplant, had been influenced by the political, social, and climatic conditions in the colonies.5 Whether those so designated were born in the New World or were transplants, early modern definitions of Creole transcended social, ethnic, and racial boundaries. A Creole could be white or black, free or enslaved, or of British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, or Spanish descent. It was only in nineteenth-century Louisiana that “Creole” was strategically redefined to designate the white descendants of French or Spanish colonists.6 Similarly, the concept of “creolization” has also undergone a shift in meaning. While the idea of becoming Creole often evoked fears of degeneration and decline among early modern colonists and colonial officials, the concept of creolization has been used by contemporary scholars to describe processes of cultural transformation that, while departing from Old World thinking, still acknowledge and productively engage the cultural continuities between the Old World and the New. Creolization as a process, then, blends Old and New World elements to create new cultural formations.7 On a very concrete level, Clément’s piece Papa Simon is one example for the effects of creolization, but the process, of course, also operated on a much larger scale.

Literary historian Sean Goudie, for example, characterized the early United States as a Creole nation, not simply because of its postcolonial condition after independence from the British Crown but also because its citizens consistently defined themselves through and against their relationship with other New World entities, and especially the Caribbean. Goudie points to “the formative presence of the West Indies in the early national period,” arguing that this very presence led early Americans to suppress their associations with the term “Creole” in favor of a different kind of New World identity.8 This specific “American” version of New World identity engages the transformations occurring through creolization without evoking the term’s negative connotations. In this way “American” emerges as an alternative designation to describe New World identity, albeit one that erases racial and cultural hybridity to privilege whiteness, Anglo-Saxon ancestry, and ethnic purity. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Goudie concludes, “the process of (un)becoming U.S. American . . . was oftentimes dependent on (un)becoming creole.”9

Nowhere on the American continent was the relationship between (un)becoming Creole and (un)becoming American more contentious than in Louisiana, a region that by the early nineteenth century had undergone three regime changes. Transferred from France to Spain, then back to France, and ultimately to the United States, Louisiana’s changing governments did not necessarily result in changes of allegiance among its local residents. In 1768, for example, Louisiana’s French colonists did not welcome their new Spanish rulers, and they organized a revolt. In 1803 the American takeover was met with fervent and persistent displays of French patriotism. When, during the first decade of American rule, thousands of immigrants from the French Caribbean reached Louisiana in the wake of the Haitian Revolution, they not only reinvigorated the local francophone community but also exacerbated the tension created by US government attempts to make Louisiana more American in the face of the local residents’ resistance to unbecoming Creole.10

The history of francophone theatricals in Louisiana unfolds against this backdrop. It is a story of local rivalries, Old and New World influences, Caribbean migrations, and transatlantic exchanges. Founded in 1792, the francophone theatre of New Orleans was not only the first permanent playhouse in the vast colony of Louisiana but also the first theatrical venue in what was then considered the American West. Before 1800 theatrical activities were concentrated on the Atlantic seaboard, where dedicated theatre buildings had been constructed in Williamsburg (1716), New York City (1733), Charleston (1735), Philadelphia (1749), Annapolis (1752), Newport (1793), Boston (1794), and Baltimore (1794). Over time theatrical circuits emerged around the larger cities. New England was served by companies that were based in New York City; Philadelphia troupes catered to theatre enthusiasts in Baltimore and Washington, DC; and the towns of the Chesapeake region were visited by a troupe that was centered in Charleston. After 1800 the Charleston circuit was expanded to other southern cities like Richmond, Savannah, and Atlanta, but it never included New Orleans.11

As New Orleans was a francophone city until well into the nineteenth century, its theatrical tradition was not anchored in the colonial United States but firmly grounded in the French Atlantic. Stretching from Paris and Versailles to important coastal cities like Bordeaux, La Rochelle, Nantes, Le Havre, and Marseille, the French Atlantic also included the African slave trading posts in Senegambia, Benin, and Gorée; the Caribbean islands of Saint-Domingue, Martinique, and Guadeloupe; Cayenne (French Guiana) on the South American continent; and New France in North America with its five colonies of Canada, Île-Royale, Acadia, Terre-Neuve, and Louisiana.12 These sites were connected by the multidirectional flows of people, ideas, and commodities that did not simply link the métropole to its colonies but also related the colonies to each other and to other locales in Europe, Africa, and the American hemisphere, creating what scholars have termed a “circum-Atlantic” world.13 Considering New Orleans as a part of and key site within a circum-Atlantic system of exchanges is crucial for understanding the history and development of the city’s francophone theatre. It was shaped not only by the theatrical traditions that arrived directly from France but also by the practices many Caribbean migrants brought with them when they moved to New Orleans in the wake of the Haitian Revolution. Looking at the history of New Orleans’s francophone theatre from a circum-Atlantic perspective therefore allows us to explain how French theatrical traditions were adapted and creolized not just in France’s own colonies but also in sites that had long been abandoned by the French Crown. As a case in point, this chapter examines the foundation of Louisiana’s first playhouse, established when the colony was under Spanish rule, and explores the development of the francophone stage after Louisiana was gradually absorbed into the American nation.

Founded by two brothers who had recently come to Louisiana from France, New Orleans’s first playhouse almost immediately became a bone of contention between the Spanish governor and his predominantly francophone subjects. Despite these initial difficulties and the growing Americanization of New Orleans in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the francophone theatre in the Crescent City proved surprisingly long-lived. From 1792 until 1919, encompassing a period of more than one hundred and twenty years, French theatricals dominated the lyric and dramatic scene on the Mississippi, with brief interruptions only during the Civil War. By tracing the development of the francophone stage in the Crescent City from its inception until the end of the antebellum period, this chapter seeks to uncover the reasons behind this surprising success story. It provides insight into the workings of the French-language theatre as a cultural institution and offers an introduction to the theatre’s role in the city’s political and social fabric. This institutional history of the francophone stage in New Orleans before the Civil War does more than establish valuable background information for the following chapters; it also provides a survey of important developments that can function as points of departure for future studies on the subject. As I explore the tension between unbecoming Creole and becoming American through the lens of theatre, I explain how the francophone community in New Orleans conceived of itself at a time when its importance was slowly but surely waning. Specifically, I investigate the role theatre played in insuring the continued existence of the francophone community in New Orleans, and I examine the status of that population’s cultural production in the face of increasing Anglo-American dominance. By tracing the Caribbean roots of New Orleans’s francophone stage and charting its development until the Civil War, I contend that the circum-Atlantic theatrical relations that characterized the New Orleans theatre in its earliest days were slowly replaced by processes of cultural exchange that were merely transatlantic in scope. This development, I ultimately suggest, initiated and accelerated the decline of New Orleans’s francophone population at the end of the antebellum period.

Caribbean Connections and the Beginnings of Theatre in New Orleans

Theatre in New Orleans began when violence, bloodshed, and revolt temporarily suspended theatrical operations elsewhere in the French Atlantic. While the Henri brothers were building the Crescent City’s first playhouse, the theatres on the islands of Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe were engulfed in flames. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, theatre had become a thriving enterprise in the French Caribbean: Saint-Domingue, France’s most important overseas colony, could boast no fewer than eight playhouses; Guadeloupe hosted two; and even the small island of Martinique was home to two performance venues. But when the repercussions of the 1789 French Revolution reverberated across the Atlantic, most of these theatres suspended operations, dispersing their personnel and what was left of the props, costumes, and scripts to all corners of the Atlantic world. The artists carried with them their training in French dramatic and musical arts and their experiences as colonial performers or theatre directors.14

From their inception in the 1760s, the theatres in the French Caribbean colonies looked towards the métropole. Theatre directors took great care to model their repertoires after those of the most fashionable venues in Paris. They predominantly produced opera, but they staged tragedies, comedies, and vaudevilles as well. Local compositions were few and far between, although their numbers did increase towards the end of the eighteenth century. They included “Creole” productions such as a piece titled Les Veuves créoles (The creole widows, 1768), the first published literary work written in Martinique, and Clément’s version of Rousseau’s Le Devin du village, a piece that I discuss at the beginning of this chapter.15 Actors, singers, and musicians, too, were mostly imported from France. Colonial directors either engaged complete troupes that then toured the colonial theatres, or they...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Texts and Translations
• Introduction
• 1. Circum-Atlantic Theatrical Relations: The Emergence of the Francophone Stage in a Spanish City
• 2. Local Struggles Past and Present: Creoles, Americans, and the Battle for Cultural Sovereignty
• 3. New Orleans’s Free Black Theatres: The Performance of Hemispheric Community
• 4. Negotiating Creole Identity: Citizenship, Belonging, and the American Nation
• 5. Transatlantic Vistas: Changing Alliances at Home and Abroad
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index